... this kind, 9.75 x 6.75ins/250 x 175mm, and with a smaller than normal type size (10pt?). Its word count is, I estimate, in excess of 1.4 million words, which easily dwarfs the Warren Report itself. Bugliosi is going to rescue the 'lone mad nut' thesis, the Magic Bullet, Jack Ruby as 'accidental slayer' and all the rest of the Warren Commission gospel from, to borrow a phrase of H. L. Mencken's, the 'Sheol of shattered illusions.' OK? And a lectern is highly recommended. Years ago, when the New Statesman was worth reading, it used to run a little feature entitled 'This England ...

... Floor that an oil man they met in Houston told them that half of Texas knew that LBJ had Kennedy killed. Is this plausible? I have no way of knowing. We know so little about Texas politics and organised crime in the period. For example, it is still not possible to say for certain how significant a figure Jack Ruby was in organised crime. There is little information on the relationship between the mob, law enforcement and local politicians in Texas. There are just accounts which suggest power in Texas was wielded with payoffs and murder the Billy Sol Estes case being the most conspicuous example. This is a big book, over 500 pages of text, and ...

... to conventional empiricist concerns for analytic parsimony. However, a further simple ad hoc hypothesis can make things more readily explicable. Hamshari's access to LA mob circles could have easily provided for a backstop killer – in near certainty, hotel security guard Thane Cesar( [28]) – to either shoot Kennedy or terminate Sirhan himself a la Jack Ruby. If the killing of Kennedy was, in many ways, a stroke of luck for RFK's opponents, their very range would ensure the cover-up went swiftly and smoothly. Bobby's list of enemies was truly awesome. As well as the familiar roll call of big oil, military/industrial interests, Bay of Pigs veterans, the mob ...

... same reason that previous versions of this have failed: no matter how plausible the idea, no matter how much detail we are given of other, analogous things the CIA was doing in the post-war years, Armstrong cannot show who was doing the shooting; and he cannot identify the CIA conspirators. The only plausible conspirators he offers are Jack Ruby and Lee, one of the two 'Oswalds' in the story. Both have connections to the CIA-funded anti-Castro operations; but that is all. The second thing Armstrong does is show in great detail how the FBI 'edited' the evidence about the shooting. The FBI had all the evidence collected by the Dallas police sent to Washington and ...

... poverty. When Johnson died in 1971 the news agenda was dominated by the other traumatic events of America in the 1960s and 70s – other assassinations, the Vietnam War, the Weathermen, bombings at home; etc. etc. – and he disappeared from view. Looking back on it there were two obvious focuses for the assassination research, Ruby and Oswald; and most of the effort went on Oswald. Not only was there was little knowledge of Texas among the research community, the climate of the times pushed the researchers, who were mostly left-liberals, towards the American secret state and away from Texas, crime and mere venal politicians. As for Collum and Sample, who ...

... literally in their sights, waiting for the order to fire. Just in case; belt and braces. For many people this is going to take a lot more swallowing than the Memphis mafia and the cops. But the truth is what the truth is. It gets harder to swallow. Pepper has found apparent links to Dallas and Jack Ruby! After the assassination a young and FBI agent went to inspect a car, a white Mustang, which they thought might have been involved in the assassination. This is quite odd. Pepper doesn't state that it was the white Mustang driven by Ray. The real thing or a copy, Wilson and a colleague went to the abandoned ...

... steer the committee away not only from the Mob's involvement in narcotics but also away from any connection between them and US intelligence, particularly in connection with narcotics. He was later a key figure in covering up Chiang Kai-sheck's involvement in the heroin traffic from Asia to the US, publicly blaming the Communist Chinese instead. (He also recruited Jack Ruby as an informant in Chicago in the late forties before Ruby moved to Dallas.) Kefauver's third mistake, his key political mistake, was to get up the nose of Harry Truman. Of the nineteen bills that stemmed directly from the hearings, and the further two hundred that arose from the Committee's official report, not one made it ...

... Louis Theroux, Ronson tries to come across to his subjects as a completely harmless nebbisch in the hope that they won't notice him playing out the rope with which they hang themselves. On TV it was sporadically entertaining, depending on the quality of the subject: Jim Tucker of Spotlight and his decades of pursuing Bilderberg, Randy Weaver of the Ruby Ridge shooting incident, and David Icke peddling his lizard theory in Canada- these programmes were quite amusing. One of the best sections on TV was Ronson trying to persuade a bunch of Canadian anti-racist campaigners who were preparing to disrupt Icke's Canadian tour, that Icke isn't using 'lizards' as a metaphor for the Jews, he really means ...

... Assassination Archives Record Board, which has provided a huge trove of additional material-- multiple Oswalds, formerly censored files from the House Commission in the 70s, Government surveillance of the Garrison investigation. The Fourth Decade had a great mix of scholarship and good writing- exemplified by 'You Don't Know Me But You Will: the World of Jack Ruby' (TTD November 1987), and 'These Are A Few of my Favorite Forgeries' (TTD March 1986) by the editor/publisher Jerry D. Rose. It also featured a number of articles which were so strange they really belong in a book of Macabre Assassination Tales, alongside Ambrose Bierce and Philip K. Dick. ...

... of JFK's death by preventing forward movement. Fair enough, but here, though, I must weigh in on the side of over-determination. Given the catalogue of insouciant lawbreaking detailed in this book,(12) the political volte face from cold war to detente, the accumulation of enemies at every turn, Hersh's overall conclusion that 'Oswald and Ruby acted alone' (p.451) is explicable only in terms of the near elemental fear that the subject evokes in the American journalistic psyche. If anything, the mountain of evidence on the administration's flaws and contradictions which Hersh has captured- and his stance of avowed scepticism- only serves the opposite conclusion. The taboo around the presidential office ...